This summer, Dr. McCullagh’s Lab partnered with Kicker to bring the Sound of Science to schools and the public to learn about how sound works. Both Cameron Miller and I, Peyton Williams, were hired to design and build exhibits to stimulate excitement for science and to show how sound is created, displayed, and perceived by the brain. Of all the projects we built, our two favorites included the sound localization project and building a Kundt’s tube display.  For the sound localization design, an array of eight speakers were arranged in a circle with a switcher board located in the middle. This display will show viewers how sound is obtained by the human ear and how it is important to be in the right location to hear certain sounds. For the Kundt’s tube display, we wanted to show how a sound wave is created. We used an acrylic tube, filled it with small Styrofoam balls and built two caps for the ends, where one side had a speaker, and the other end was completely closed off. When the speaker is played, it shows how the different sound waves are created by different frequencies. If you are interested in taking a closer look and hearing more about the project, we presented a YouTube with Kicker’s Unmasked Live Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbRK9Ostbp4, to demonstrate all that has been built so far and how each display works. Overall, Cameron and I have had a great time working with Aaron Surrat from Kicker.  The project provided an awesome learning experience for both of us.

Sound production and reception are accessible topics for people to gain an interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields through its interdisciplinary nature (engineering, neuroscience, math, biology, etc.) and relatable features (sound waves, personal experience with sound). With the overall goal of stimulating excitement for STEM in people across ages, we are developing a mobile exhibit featuring sound production and reception in partnership with local speaker company, Kicker. Kicker will bring the display to festivals where they are presenting their company to bring science to the public where they are, rather than folks having to come to science spaces. The exhibit will also travel to local schools and be designed and tested on campus at OSU. We are creating an industry and academic partnership through design of the exhibit which will be a collaboration between an OSU undergraduate intern working both with Dr. McCullagh and the staff at Kicker. This project will lead to a broad impact, directly benefiting career and professional development for people at OSU designing the project, the OSU community that gets to learn as they interact with the exhibit, local Oklahoma schools, and the broader general public. This proposal exemplifies community engagement by partnering academia with local industry to directly impact local communities within Oklahoma and across the United States.

Primary objectives:

• Bring science to the public through tradeshows, school interaction, and OSU campus deployment
• Provide public-private experience for students working on the project and hands-on training relevant to multiple career paths
• Stimulate excitement for science in those interacting with the exhibit across ages

The position:

-Looking for an highly motivated undergrad interested in science communication/education and a strong interest or background in Biology/Physics/Neuroscience

-Hourly position for 20 hours per week split between time at Kicker, engaging stakeholders, and the McCullagh lab

-Start July 1st through August 18th at $17 / hr

-Preferred qualifications include ability to work with tools, communication skills, organized, motivated, and commitment to the project

For consideration send your CV/resume and short (500 words or less) statement of interest to Liz McCullagh (elizabeth.mccullagh@okstate.edu) by 5/31

Congratulations graduating seniors!

Elizabeth Farmer is another Team Frog member that joined the lab in Fall 2021. She has been a great contribution to the lab collecting and analyzing parasitized green frog ABRs and helping with analyses of tree frog ABRs. She also won the Karen L Smith poster presentation award for her work on green frogs. We are excited to see what she will do next and I know her interests in microbiology will serve her well and hopefully she will get into a great masters program to continue her research aspirations.

Madeline Loosen joined the McCullagh lab in Fall 2021. She is a physiology major with aspirations for medical school. We think she is highly deserving of this future career and she received the Dr. Raymond Dixon Scholarship in rural health last year. She has been a tireless worker in the lab performing immunofluorescence (IF) experiments on prairie vole brains. She has taught at least half the lab how to perform brain slicing experiments and IF. We know that whatever she does in the future she will succeed.

We really enjoy the time we get with our undergraduates, they really do make up the heart of the lab. While often their time in lab is too short, we are really lucky to get to work with them as they grow into independent researchers. This year we are losing 5 awesome undergraduates to their degrees, but I am so excited for each of them and I know they are going to go on and do amazing things.

Awards

Members of the McCullagh lab received several awards this Spring.

–Vanessa Franco was awarded a Wentz scholarship for Fall 2023-Spring 2024 and presented her work at the Society for Integrative Biology (SICB) in Austin, TX in January 2023 through the support of the Charlotte Magnum scholarship provided by SICB

–Luberson Joseph received an IB graduate program travel award to travel to the Animal Behavior Society conference in Portland, OR this summer

–Sabiha Alam received an IB graduate program travel award for travel to the Society for Neuroscience conference in D.C. this Fall 2023

–Jesse Hurd received the outstanding Ph.D. student TA award

–Margaret New received the IB Outstanding Biology Senior award

–Dustin Meadows, a recent addition to the McCullagh lab, received the IB Lyle Family Scholarship

–Shay Nguyen presented their work at both the GCURS and NCUR representing the McCullagh lab well!

Publications

We have had several publications come out of the McCullagh lab in the last year…

Sabiha Alam had her first publication in the McCullagh lab accepted in October 2022. It is a comprehensive review on nutritional interventions in Fragile X Syndrome and Autism Spectrum Disorders with specific focus on basic research, pre-clinical, and clinical studies. Alam S, Westmark CJ, McCullagh EA (2022) Diet in the treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders. Frontiers in Neuroscience accepted 10/31/22 doi:10.3389/fnins.2022.1031016

Liz McCullagh and her co-authors that all presented a symposium at the Association for Research in Otolaryngology in 2022 worked together to publish a review highlighting the importance of comparative animal models for hearing research that was recently published in the Annual reviews for the journal Hearing Research. Capshaw G*, Brown AD, Pena JL, Carr CE, Christensen-Dalsgaard J, Tollin DJ, Womack MC*, McCullagh EA* (2023)The continued importance of comparative auditory research to modern scientific discovery. Hearing Research 2023:108766. doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2023.108766

Liz McCullagh also got together with co-authors Anna Sumera, Sam Booker, and Ben-Zheng Li to write a perspective piece for a special edition in the American Chemical Society (ACS) Chemical Neuroscience. In this article, we discuss the importance of dendritic spines in neurodevelopmental disorders with a focus on analysis, new tools for quantifying, and the best tools for different types of research questions. Li B-Z^*, Sumera A^*, Booker S^#, McCullagh EA^# (2023) Current best practices for analysis of dendritic spine morphology and number in neurodevelopmental research. ACS Chemical Neuroscience doi.org/10.1021/acschemneuro.3c00062  *co-first author ^#co-corresponding author

This summer holds a lot of interesting projects and hopefully some more good news in terms of publications, awards, and research endeavors. We are excited to host our first ON-RaMP technician for the coming summer and year, veterinary student Rachel Scherer, and of course our undergraduate and graduate researchers. In addition, we will have our first visit from colleague Giulia Bertolin through funding from the FACE Foundation to get our project on mitochondrial dysfunction in FXS off the ground.

It was, indeed, a great experience for the McCullagh lab attending SfN 2022 at San Diego, CA this year. Jesse, Amita and Sabiha presented their research in SfN in person, while Andi chose the virtual platform. Their experience added a new spice, when on November 11, their flight from Stillwater to Dallas got canceled. All of them including Dr. Liz were trying their best to find out any possible solution but nothing worked out, since all flights from Tulsa and OKC to Dallas and suddenly no option was left except driving to Dallas from Stillwater and Yesss, finally they made it. 

Jesse: “I had a great time at SfN, getting to meet so many new people and learn about so much ongoing research. At first, 24,000 people seems very overwhelming, but everything is pretty-well organized based on topic and field of interest, so it’s easy to find out where you want to be and who you’d like to meet. The vendors were fun, friendly, and sent me home with so many freebies I almost couldn’t zip my suitcase! San Diego is a beautiful city I was happy to enjoy with Liz, Sabiha, and Amita. Looking forward to next year in D.C.!”

Sabiha: For me, attending the conference in person and visiting San Diego both were my first time experience, so you can feel my excitement. I met a lot of scientists, students, scholars and got astonished to see how amazing and advanced neuroscience research can be and how differently people think and learn everything. There were a lot of options for mini symposiums, professional development workshops along with poster presentation sessions, which I found really helpful too to expand my knowledge that underlies my research interest. Also,the sparkling city light and bright sunshine is still on my mind. Such a beautiful and lively city is San Diego !

Andi: SfN virtual experience was good. There were so many videos from virtual submissions it was almost too much. It made it difficult to sort through and search for research that you were particularly interested in. There were live streams of minisymposium research that you could watch, about 20 minute presentations from the authors. There were also larger presentations that were about an hour you could watch, but my preference was the mini symposiums as the research was personally more intriguing. I had it on in the background while I worked, as each minisymposium was about 4 hours long. I feel like being virtual I did miss out on a lot of different research, as only a small portion of the total conference was part of the mini symposiums that were livestreamed.

Amita: Well, it is a big conference. It was my first in-person experience there with my advisor and lab members. We all had a great time there exploring knowledge through joining various poster sessions and lectures. We all presented posters there with a huge number of audience and suggestions from them. It was accomplished with dinner and a tour on the mission beach with my advisor and lab members having spent a great time with each other.

We had a wonderful summer full of work related and fun travel for folks in the lab, not to mention lots of lab work being done as well. It was a really great summer to have all 5 PhD students around as well as 5 undergrads who worked in the lab for the summer. Here are some highlights:

Amita and Andi traveled 🚗 to Iowa to Dr. Samuel Young’s lab to learn neonatal rodent injection techniques. Thanks Sam for hosting and for his lab for sharing their time. I know Andi and Amita learned a lot!

Liz had lots of work-related travel ✈️ including a trip to Tuscany Italy for the Gordon Research Seminar and Conference on Fragile X Syndrome and Autism where she presented a poster and talked about the lab’s work. In addition she attended the Animal Behavior Society meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica. There were also some fun trips in there to play ultimate frisbee with her club team Hayride and grand masters team at Nationals.

Back in the lab, students were busy studying sperm, collecting wild rodents 🐁 to measure their hearing 👂, running samples through the ICP, slicing 🧠, running behavioral experiments, collecting tree frogs 🐸, and so much more! Special shout out to Madeline, Shay, Kaitlyn, Vanessa, and Tamara who spent their undergraduate summer doing work in the lab.

To top off the summer, we got some really great news on a few things:

• Luberson, Amita, and Sabiha will be funded on RA for the next two years through a DEIA supplement to our current NIH R15 funding
• Andi will also be funded through a diversity supplement on RA for the next two years
• Exciting research collaboration starting with Dr. Guilia Bertolin in France 🇫🇷 over the next two years
• A paper from Liz’s postdoc on naked-mole rat hearing across development came out in Proceedings B (which also features lab alumni Addi Gaut who helped with immunofluorescence experiments)
• Liz became a part of the Weaving the Future of Animal Behavior (WFAB) program which helped fund her trip to Costa Rica and provides her with an awesome professional development cohort
• Liz gave a webinar to the Hearing Health Foundation on Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD)
• Dr. Michael Reichert and Liz received funding for a new post baccalaureate program through NSF called ON-RaMP providing mentorship and training in biological sciences.
• Liz traveled back to Colorado to film her recent paper on coherent anti-stokes raman scattering (CARS) for measuring myelin that has been published in JoVE

We are really looking forward to Fall 2022 since I have a feeling all our hard work this summer is going to lead to more good news in the future. Thanks everyone for all your support and of course to all the students working and playing in the lab!

We have lots to celebrate in the lab this April! Here are some of the highlights:

Ph.D. student Jesse Hurd received an Honorable Mention for her NSF GRFP application, and even better (since the latter doesn’t actually give you the award) got the G-Rise NIH T32 fellowship which provides her with three years of stipend funding.

Not to be outdone, the undergrads are also getting recognized and funding for their research!

Margaret New received a second year of Wentz funding for her research on wild rodent hearing. She will also present her research findings from the last two years at the Wentz poster session on Friday.

Ishani Ray received the Purdie award to fund her research in the lab next year on Fragile X Syndrome and myelination.

Madeline Loosen received the Integrative Biology Dr. Raymond Dixon Scholarship in rural health in recognition for her pre-health ambitions and outstanding academic achievements.

Shay Nguyen presented their work at the Freshman Research Scholar poster session last week and did a great job!

Casey Sergott, Shay Nguyen and Emmy Fowler are going to present their work on sperm characteristics of prairie voles for both the undergraduate research symposium and Karen L Smith symposium. So grateful we have so many opportunities for undergrads to present their work!

And as it goes – what’s some good news without a few disappointments:

Dr. Reichert and I did not receive our NSF grant on tree frog auditory decision making

Sabiha and Jesse did not receive Women’s Faculty Awards

We were unsuccessful with Niblack applications for undergraduate research

As always I think it’s important to recognize the set backs with the accolades to normalize rejection and share that we don’t always get everything we apply for.

I am still pretty dang proud of everything we have accomplished and grateful for these amazing folks I can call my lab mates and mentees.

Dr. Reichert and I took a lab meeting for the labs to draft some DEJI statements. I think they turned out wonderful and I am so excited to work with people who are committed to these values!

Our mission is to learn more about the natural world and help others to do the same, by being supportive of each other, active in our community, and always working to make a more inclusive science for everyone.

Our mission is to make science approachable to anyone who is interested by being open and understanding of the diversity of people (in thought, interests, background, etc.)

Our mission is to include all members regardless of background and commit to working in a diverse setting. All groups should have an equal opportunity to learn and bring forward meaningful science. 

Our mission is to foster scientific opportunity within and outside academia through inclusion, equal representation, and accessibility. 

Our mission is to create an accessible and inclusive lab environment by valuing members’ varying backgrounds, experiences, and opinions.

Our mission is to cultivate scientific thinking and research for a better good beyond and to inculcate these ideas beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries 

Our mission is to perform robust scientific research by encouraging people of diverse opinions, perspectives, and cultural backgrounds to bring their whole identities to the lab.

First off, big congratulations 🎊 🎈 🎉 to graduating seniors Patrick Crotty and Addi Gaut!!!

Patrick was in the lab for the semester and was super helpful working with Amita to do some immunohistochemistry. He is off to medical school next year (wherever he decided to go will be lucky to have him). It was wonderful to get to know you as both my student in Principles of Neuroscience and in the lab!

Addi will be sorely missed! She is starting at University of Tulsa Law School in January and I couldn’t be more proud! Addi joined the lab as a junior and quickly took over all of the anatomical experiments. Not only was she a quick learner and independent, but she was able to bring a new technique into the lab and then teach me (RNAscope). There are several publications that will be coming out of the work she put into her time at OSU, so stay tuned. I’m not sure what we will do without her, but I know she is going to be a wonderful lawyer.

Rachael Brodsky (M.S. student) is also off to pursue new interests. She is leaving us to go to school for social work at OU. Rachael is one of the most compassionate and thoughtful people I know and I am sure she is going to thrive in her new program.

Other Updates

Undergrads Gabby Byus and Elizabeth Farmer presented their work with frogs 🐸 at the Karen L Smith Symposium hosted by the Integrative Biology Department. Both did an amazing job, and Elizabeth tied for first place for her presentation!

We had the wonderful update that former Team Frog 🐸 undergrad Molly Hood has been accepted into dental school at OU – also super proud and couldn’t be happier for her!

Lastly we had our first lab holiday party! It was really nice to wind down the semester with folks and eat, drink (sparkling cider), and be merry!

It has been a whirlwind of a past few months! Here are a few quick highlights of what is going on in the lab!

People!

1. New members joining! We have several new PhD graduate students that started this summer, Luberson Joseph and Sabiha Alam. We have our newest MS quickly-turned PhD student Jesse Hurd that joined this Fall. Welcome!
2. New undergrads joining! Lots of new undergrads joining the lab including Madeline Loosen, Gabby Byus, Elizabeth Farmer, Casey Sergott, Patrick Crotty, and Melissa Sullivan.
3. Welcome back to returning undergrads, Addi Gaut, Ishani Ray, Adam Ramirez, Margaret New, and Kaitlyn Welker and of course M.S. student Rachael Brodsky and Ph.D. student Amita Chawla.

*check out more info about everyone here.

Papers!

1. In collaboration with members of 500 Women Scientists, we evaluated the gage. platform. Our results were published in September in FACETS: https://www.facetsjournal.com/doi/full/10.1139/facets-2021-0033
2. Manuscript submitted examining myelination deficits in the brainstem of Fragile X Syndrome mice. This is work that is the basis for a new NIH NICHD R15 award (see below!). Much of this work was generated by awesome technicians Shani Poleg and Alexandra Lucas while I was a postdoc in Achim Klug’s lab. Check it out on BioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.08.459530v1
3. First manuscript from the lab submitted for review! This manuscript characterizing the hearing ability of a social rodent, the monogamous prairie vole. Margaret New collected some of this data with lots of help to set up our system from Dr. Tim Lei and Ben-Zheng Li. Check it out on BioRxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.07.463519v1

Funding!

We got our first major grant as a new lab! Thanks to funding from the National Institutes of Health NICHD R15 AREA mechanism we now have funding to pursue the myelination project for which our first publication is under review right now – see above. For some more info check out this blurb on the Department of Integrative Biology’s website: https://integrativebiology.okstate.edu/news/533-mccullagh-lab-receives-nih-grant